The image of Wikileaks being a non-partisan outlet for whistle-blowers has been called into question after it has revealed that Julian Assange was turning down caches of documents embarrassing to the Russian government.

Throughout the US election, Assange insisted that publishing documents from Democratic operatives obtained by Kremlin-directed hackers was legit, even if it did help the Russian backed Donald Trump get elected.

More than 68 gigabytes of data were offered to Wikileaks from a whistleblower inside the Russian Interior Ministry. Message logs, which have been ironically leaked from inside Wikileaks show that Assange insisted that the documents were “already public” and “could not be verified”, forgetting that this is a contradiction.

The cache revealed details about Russian military and intelligence involvement in Ukraine and its existence was recorded in 2014. However, the cache shown to the BBC and other news outlets was less than half the size of the data which became available in 2016, when Assange turned it down.

The source who provided the messages to the media said that several leaks sent to Wikileaks, including the Russian hack would have exposed Russian activities and shown WikiLeaks was not controlled by Russian security services.

“Many Wikileaks staff and volunteers or their families suffered at the hands of Russian corruption and cruelty, we were sure Wikileaks would release it. Assange gave excuse after excuse.”

The Russian cache was eventually published online elsewhere where it failed to get any attention.

WikiLeaks in its early years published a broad scope of information, including emails belonging to Sarah Palin and Scientologists, phone records of Peruvian politicians, and inside information from surveillance companies. “We don’t have targets”, Assange said at the time and it was pretty much true.

But by 2016, WikiLeaks changed tactics and focused almost exclusively on Clinton and her campaign.

Emails show that it was approached by the same source about data from an American security company, WikiLeaks again turned down the leak. “Is there an election angle? We’re not doing anything until after the election unless its [sic] fast or election related,” Assange wrote. “We don’t have the resources” and “Anything not connected to the election would be “diversionary”.

All this is strange as WikiLeaks started out attacking Russia with the same gusto as it did the US. In October 2010, Assange and WikiLeaks teased a massive dump of documents that would expose wrongdoing in the Kremlin, teaming up with a Russian news site for the rollout. “We have [compromising materials] about Russia, about your government and businessmen,” Assange told a Russian newspaper.

In November 2010, WikiLeaks began to release documents from its cache provided by Chelsea Manning, which included cables from US diplomats around the world, including Russia.

But in 2012 Assange was getting closer to the Russians, he had his own show on the Kremlin-funded news network RT, and that same year, he produced episodes for the network where he interviewed opposition thinkers like Noam Chomsky and so-called “cypherpunks”.

Then in 2012 WikiLeaks failed to publish documents that revealed a 2 billion euro transaction between the Syrian regime and a government-owned Russian bank in 2012. Details about that set of documents appear in leaked court records obtained by the Daily Dot, which were sealed by a Manhattan federal court.

A WikiLeaks spokesperson suggested the Daily Dot was “pushing the Hillary Clinton campaign’s neo-McCarthyist conspiracy theories about critical media” and claimed Daily Dot was part of a conspiracy which involved US officials damaging "Assange’s reputation (sic)".

Another strange case was when Novaya Gazeta reported in April 2016 on the 11.5 million documents known as the Panama Papers, which exposed how powerful figures worldwide hide their money overseas.

Assange publicly slammed the work and that reporters had “cherry-picked” the documents to publish for optimal “Putin bashing, North Korea bashing, sanctions bashing, etc.” while giving Western figures a pass.

However, any observer would have told you that publishing leaks damaged several Western figures, including the then British Prime Minister David Cameron. A number of Western politicians lost their jobs and western dodgy business arrangements were revealed. The point is that this is exactly the sort of leak that Wikileaks should have been doing, but it was suppressed because Assange believed it was anti-Putin.

All this seems to suggest that Assange’s Wikileaks has become partisan and anyone who disagrees is claimed to be in the pockets of the Clintons or the CIA.

Russian spooks hacked at least one US voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election.

A classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept shows the latest information acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure.

The report, dated May 5, 2017, indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated further into US voting systems than was previously understood and the attacks were conducted by the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU.

One hack was in August 2016, to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. The idea was to launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting US local government organisations.

All this is at odds with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denial last week that Russia had interfered in foreign elections. He claimed that Russia never engaged in that on a state level, and had no intention of doing so.

Putin, who had previously issued blanket denials that any such Russian meddling occurred, for the first time floated the possibility that freelance Russian hackers with “patriotic leanings” may have been responsible. The NSA report, on the contrary, displays no doubt that the cyber assault was carried out by the GRU.

The NSA has now learned, that Russian government hackers, part of a team with a “cyber espionage mandate specifically directed at U.S. and foreign elections, focused on parts of the system directly connected to the voter registration process, including a private sector manufacturer of devices that maintain and verify the voter rolls.

Tsar of all the Russias, Vladimir Putin, has admitted that Russian hackers probably did game the American election to help President Donald (Prince of Orange) Trump win.

Putin has not admitted it was his propaganda unit which was involved in the hack of the US Democratic Party, but rather claimed it was some “patriotically minded” Russian hackers.

The Russian President insisted his government had no involvement, but acknowledged it was “theoretically possible” tensions could have prompted some individuals to launch cyber-attacks.

“Hackers are free people, just like artists who wake up in the morning in a good mood and start painting,” Mr Putin said at a meeting with international news agencies.

“The hackers are the same. They would wake up, read about something going on in interstate relations and if they feel patriotic, they may try to contribute to the fight against those who speak badly about Russia.”

“No hackers can have a radical impact on an election campaign in another country,” Mr Putin said.

However, investigators are becoming interested in a triangle of contacts between Russia, WikiLeaks, and Julian Assange. One of these people who appears to have acted as a go between was UKIP party leader Nigel Farage.

The FBI have just listed Farage as a "person of interest" in the case as he is in the middle of these relationships. He turns up over and over again.

Farage, who campaigned for decades for Britain to leave the European Union, was a vocal backer of Trump, appearing on the campaign trail and meeting him in New York soon after the election victory.

Farage denies it all, of course, and to be fair we don't think he has the brains or the ability to be a Russian spy. We suspect that he is the sort who has 1234 or his own name as his password.

“This hysterical attempt to associate me with the Putin regime is a result of the liberal elite being unable to accept Brexit and Trump,” Farage said.

Current and former US officials fear that state-sponsored hackers could try to exploit Kaspersky Lab’s anti-virus software to steal and manipulate users’ files, read private emails or attack critical infrastructure in the US. Kaspersky Lab executives have previous ties to Russian intelligence and military agencies.

The company has repeatedly insisted it poses no threat to US customers and would never allow itself to be used as a tool of the Russian government.

But in a secret memorandum sent last month to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Senate Intelligence Committee raised possible red flags about Kaspersky Lab and urged the intelligence community to address potential risks posed by the company’s powerful market position.

The FBI is in the midst of a counterintelligence investigation looking into the nature of Kaspersky Lab’s relationship to the Russian government.

We reported a couple of weeks ago how senior members of the US intelligence community for the first time publicly expressed fears that Kaspersky Lab could pose a threat to the US.

Kaspersky Lab software is popular with federal agencies as the US Bureau of Prisons, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and some segments of the Défense Department.

Kaspersky Lab insisted: "As a private company, Kaspersky Lab has no ties to any government, and the company has never helped, nor will help, any government in the world with its cyberespionage efforts.”

The US, which was once paranoid about Chinese hackers, is now so concerned about Russia’s hackers it is now focusing on the country’s cyber security expert Kaspersky.

The fear is that Putin might lean on Kaspersky to snoop on Americans or sabotage key US systems.

Kaspersky products are widely used in homes, businesses and government agencies throughout the United States, including the Bureau of Prisons. Kaspersky Lab’s products are stocked on the shelves of Target and Best Buy, which also sells laptops loaded by manufacturers with the firm’s anti-virus software.

A memo sent last month to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Senate Intelligence Committee raised possible red flags about Kaspersky Lab and urged the intelligence community to address potential risks posed by the company’s powerful market position.

“This is an important national security issue,” declared the bipartisan memorandum.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a secret report on the matter to other government agencies. And the FBI is investigating the nature of Kaspersky Lab’s relationship to the Russian government.

Kaspersky has repeatedly insisted it poses no threat to US customers and would never be used as a government tool.

But apparently, some of its executives worked for Russian intelligence and military agencies and the outfit’s possible relationship with Russian intelligence services makes a lot of people in the national security community uncomfortable.

US officials fear Kaspersky Lab products have the potential to facilitate Russian cyberattacks on power grids or other key utilities.

Last year, FBI officials communicated potential concerns about Kaspersky Lab to a select group of private-sector leaders, including the Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council, an organization of electric company chiefs from across North America, sources said. The Senate Intelligence Committee also received several briefings on the matter.

However Kaspersky has long maintained it has no “inappropriate” links with the Russian government, and it recently issued a statement dismissing the types of concerns being raised by US officials.

“Kaspersky Lab does not develop any offensive techniques and has never helped nor will help any government in the world with their offensive efforts in cyberspace,” it read.

It is also possible to configure Kaspersky products so that they do not send any data to servers in foreign locations like Russia. Also, enterprise and government users can install a local “Kaspersky security network center on their premises to make sure the data never leaves their facility or country.

Eugene Kaspersky surmised that US officials are now voicing concerns about his company “simply because” of the “present geopolitical turbulence” and the firm’s growing success.

Hackers working for Tsar Putin had another go at gaming an election with its usual partners of Far Right groups and Wikileaks.

Emmanuel Macron's campaign was hacked by the same Russian hacker crew who worked so hard to get Donald (Prince of Orange) Trump elected and this time it was clear that Tsar Putin wanted the National Front candidate Marine Le Pen in charge.

But this time they appeared to be taking the Nintendo. Not only did the leak appear too close to the end of the Election, the hacked cache included fake emails.

Even Wikileaks admitted that the cache was dodgy. Even as WikiLeaks helped spread news of the hack, the group’s French lawyer, Juan Branco, wrote that the “MacronLeaks” dump “disgusts me”.

“What are we playing at?” asked Branco, who is running for a seat in Parliament next month as a candidate of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise party.Instead of important revelations, an initial review of the documents circulating under the MacronLeaks tag by Julien Cadot, a journalist for the site Numerama, suggested that they “seem to be utterly banal”.

“There are briefing notes, bills, loans for amounts that are not excessive,” Cadot explained, along with “strictly personal and private exchanges — personal notes on rain and good weather, a confirmation email on the publication of a novel, the reservation of a table between friends”.

But the leaks were made worse by US Far Right activists who appeared to have gotten their paws on the leak in advance and were tailoring blogs with similar language and highlighting similar things.

The rapid spread on fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook and the messaging forum 4chan.

Analysis conducted by The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab published on Saturday found that the hashtag #MacronLeaks reached 47,000 tweets in three and a half hours after it was first used by Jack Posobiec, a writer in Washington for the Far Right news organization The Rebel. Posobiec's online biography said he coordinated grassroots organizing for a group that supported US President Donald Trump's campaign.

Posobiec's initial tweet on the Macron documents was retweeted fifteen times within one minute and 87 times in five minutes, Atlantic Council senior fellow Ben Nimmo wrote in a blog published on Medium. Posobiec is prolific on Twitter, where he has a large following of more than 100,000 accounts.

The goal of the Bots was to move the hashtag from the United States to France, according to Nimmo, where surveys show far-right leader Marine Le Pen trailing Macron by more than 20 points heading into Sunday's election.

French electoral law forbids candidates from commenting during Saturday and until polling stations close on Sunday.

WikiLeaks did not publish the information itself but tweeted about the leak at least 15 times.

"As the dominant publication in the field we were hours ahead of all other major outlets," WikiLeaks boasted in a private Twitter message. "That's what our readers expect."

About nine gigabytes of data purporting to be documents from the Macron campaign were posted on Pastebin, a site that allows anonymous document sharing.

The US cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint told Reuters that an initial review of the Macron leaks indicated that APT 28, a group tied to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence unit, were be behind the leak.

Among other indicators, the firm said metadata contained in one of the leaked files showed it had been modified by someone who works in the technology industry in Moscow.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied accusations it has attempted to use cyber-attacks to game the French or US elections.

Fortunately the leak was left too late to damage the French elections which resulted in a drubbing for the National Front. It was also helped by the French legal system which prevented the papers reporting on the leaks until after the election.

Desperate to divert Republican attention from the fact his chum and benefactor Tsar Vladamir Putin hacked the Democratic Party and helped him win the election, Donald (Prince of Orange) Trump is blaming China.

Without a shred of proof, and flying in the face of hard evidence from his own spooks which points the finger at Putin, Trump claimed China may have hacked the emails of Democratic officials to meddle with the 2016 presidential election.

In an interview transcript published on Sunday, Trump said: "If you don't catch a hacker, okay, in the act, it's very hard to say who did the hacking. It could have been China, could have been a lot of different groups."

The hackers roiled the presidential campaign by making public embarrassing emails sent by Democratic operatives and aides to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. One email showed party leaders favouring Clinton over her rival in the campaign for the party's internal nomination contest.

Trump has been dismissive of the statements by intelligence officials that Moscow hacked the emails to help Trump win the election.

During the 26 Sept Trump said China was one of many actors that could have been behind the hack, including "somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds".

For a brief period, most of the world’s financial traffic was routed through a Russian government-controlled telecom and in the hands of Tsar Putin.

Network traffic belonging to MasterCard, Visa, and more than two dozen other financial services companies were briefly routed through a Russian government-controlled telecom. It was only for five minutes and might have been because someone at Rostelecom, the Russian government-controlled telecom that improperly announced ownership of the blocks, turned a switch.

"Typically, accidental leaks appear more voluminous and indiscriminate. This would appear to be targeted to financial institutions. A typical cause of these errors [is] in some sort of internal traffic engineering, but it would seem strange that someone would limit their traffic engineering to mostly financial networks."

Normally, the network traffic bound for MasterCard, Visa, and the other affected companies passes through services providers that the companies hire and authorize. Using BGP routing tables, the authorized providers "announce" their ownership of the large blocks of IP addresses belonging to the client companies.

However Rostelecom suddenly announced its control of the blocks and the traffic flowed into the affected networks started passing through Rostelecom's routers

If the Russians were quick or prepared they could have intercepted or manipulated traffic flowing into the affected address space

Even if data couldn't be decrypted, attackers could use the diverted traffic to enumerate what parties were initiating connections to MasterCard and the other affected companies. The attacker could then target those parties, which may have weaker defences.

The US Department of Commerce lists Rostelecom as a state-owned enterprise and reports that one or more senior government officials have seats on Rostelecom's board of directors so it is probably nothing to worry about.

Any hope of a partnership between Wikileaks, Google, Microsoft, and Apple to fix holes that the CIA has found in their products has hit a roadblock because Julian Assange is insisting that the big three do everything the way he says.

Last week, WikiLeaks promised it would share the technical details and code of the hacking tools that the CIA has developed against Google, Apple, Microsoft and other tech companies.

This sounds useful, but it seems that Assange is only going to hand over the data if the big three do what they are told and handle it his way.

WikiLeaks included a document in the email, asking the companies to sign off on a series of conditions before being able to receive the technical details to deploy patches.

One condition was that the companies would commit to issuing a patch within three months. While you would think this is a good thing, the tech companies are worried about where Assange got the documents from.

The smart money is that the documents were given to Wikileaks in its role as publishing what even the Russian secret service wants made public. The fear is that if the Russians want this information made public then there has to be a reason and tech companies do not want to quickly rush out a patch which might actually help the Russian spooks.

This means that each patch will require special testing to make sure that one thing does not create another hole elsewhere that the Russians have software to exploit.

Wikileaks is known for imposing uncompromising demands on companies it works with. In 2011, Assange enraged a series of newspapers with its demands, even after they had already started collaborating. Assange also hates Google, which might make things tricky.

The CIA has "no comment on the authenticity of purported intelligence documents released by Wikileaks or on the status of any investigation into the source of the documents... As we have said previously, Julian Assange is not exactly a bastion of truth and integrity."

Indictments in the United States of four people in a 2014 cyber attack on Yahoo reveal a symbiotic relationship between Tsar Vladimir’s Putin’s security services and private Russian hackers.

Among those charged are two officers of Russia's Federal Security Service, and two hackers who allegedly worked together to crack 500 million Yahoo user accounts.

It has long been known that the Kremlin employs criminal hackers for its “geostrategic purposes” as it offers deniability to Moscow and freedom from legal troubles for the hackers.

A US intelligence official told Reuters that employing criminal hackers helps "complement Kremlin intentions and provide plausible deniability for the Russian state".

To be fair the United States sometimes engages with criminal hackers as well, buying tools from them or recruiting them to help find other criminal hackers, cyber security professionals.

Milan Patel, a former FBI cyber agent and now managing director for cyber defense at K2 Intelligence, said the intermingling of espionage and cybercrime in Russia had led the United States and its allies to be far warier about alerting Moscow to criminal hackers.

If they did, then the guys would disappear off the battlefield and end up working for the Russian government, Patel said.

Russian news accounts stressed that one of the FSB agents, Dmitry Dokuchaev, was arrested by Russian authorities in December and charged with treason.

The indictment charges Dokuchaev with having acted as a handler for a hacker named Karim Baratov, directing him to use the Yahoo data to crack emails on other systems and paying him a bounty when he succeeded.

Baratov is in custody in Canada, according to the Toronto police, while Dokuchaev remains in Russia.

Senator John Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement the indictments showed "the close and mutually beneficial ties between the cyber underworld and Russia’s government and security services".

He said the case "underscores the complexity and the urgency" of the committee's investigation of Russian interference in the US election.